elsevier – Retraction Watch

Sleuth unearths citation, authorship issues at earth sciences journal

Carlos Conforti Ferreira Guedes, a geology professor at the Federal University of Paraná in Brazil, came across a paper in the Journal of South American Earth Sciences earlier this year with irrelevant, and in some cases nonexistent, references.

Made-up citations can indicate the use of generative AI in crafting the paper – but another detail caught his attention as particularly odd: The researchers on the paper, a study on the transformation of the Brazilian coastline, all listed affiliations in India. Guedes reached out to one of the editors-in-chief of the journal at the time, Andres Folguera, on March 10 to notify the journal about the issues.

As Guedes and his colleagues noted in a May 19 blog post on the Brazilian Association for Quaternary Studies (ABEQUA) website, “there were no citations of work conducted in Brazil or by researchers who had previously worked in the region.”

Why has this microRNA review paper been cited more than 2,000 times?

Earlier this year, Marc Halushka, a pathologist at Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, came across a review titled simply “MicroRNA,” an unusually short title in a big field. Looking deeper into the review, published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology in 2018, Halushka found it had been cited more than 2,000 times. He thought this number “shockingly high,” given the article’s brevity and content.

Other, older reviews on microRNA from leaders in the field have been cited far more often, some even tens of thousands of times. But when searching “microRNA” on Google Scholar, the review with that single term as its title is the first result.

Halushka doesn’t think anything in the paper is wrong or out of date. But the citation was among those in a paper he was asked to review that he thought “was clearly a paper mill paper,” he told Retraction Watch. He suspects when people “who know nothing about microRNAs because they are just in the paper mill business” need to cite a review on the topic, they just use the top search result.

When you discover you’re an author on a paper you’ve never seen

Learning a paper with your name on it has been published is typically something to celebrate. But for one climate scientist, a recent notification was the first he learned the manuscript even existed.

So instead of rejoicing, Jan Cermak, a researcher at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, was busy writing to the journal Chemosphere about a paper he’d been credited with but never seen.

The paper, on meteorologic influences on air pollution in India, has been retracted after it became clear that a visiting fellow included Cermak as a coauthor without his permission.

Deputy department chair loses paper for image duplication, more retractions to follow

An Elsevier journal has retracted a paper coauthored by a deputy department chair at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia and says it plans to retract at least two more of his articles for image-related concerns.

The 2022 paper, in Matrix Biology, describes the regulatory role of proteoglycans in remodeling of the cervix during pregnancy. According to the August 12 retraction notice, 18 of the image panels were duplicates. The paper has been cited 18 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Renato Iozzo, deputy chair of Pathology, Anatomy & Cell Biology at Jefferson, is a coauthor on the study. Neither Iozzo nor corresponding author Mala Mahendroo, a researcher at UT Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, responded to our requests for comment.

Guest post: In the name of Scopus, one hijacked journal easily tricks authors

Editor’s note: Mahmood Anwar is a former business management professor of the National Research University in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. In the course of his research, he keeps an eye out for flawed articles, he told Retraction Watch. He currently mentors 10 to 15 researchers who found him through his YouTube channel, where he discusses research ethics and explains study methods. In his own research, Anwar has covered topics such as feminism in the New Testament and smartphone use and short term memory. Anwar is also on the editorial board for Emerald Publishing’s VILAKSHAN – XIMB Journal of Management and International Journal of Management, Economics & Social Sciences. (Neither journal is indexed in Clarivate’s Web of Science.)

Aside from his research activities, Anwar also founded “Drive in Malaysia,” the country’s “First-ever Traffic Rules & Test Site,” according to the website. In addition to providing road safety education, the company has an independent review board. Anwar says the IRB was formed to approve research internally among the five members of the IRB committee, and most of the studies they review cover social sciences and road safety.

Journal let authors make undisclosed changes that masked stolen content in paper

An Elsevier journal allowed a paper containing extensive plagiarism to remain online, while letting its authors make undisclosed revisions that masked the offense, Retraction Watch has learned. But the journal’s editor-in-chief told us he has subsequently decided to retract the paper.

The article, on cognitive impairment among older adults in India, appeared online on June 15 as a pre-proof in Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics Plus. At that point, its background section included several long paragraphs that were identical, or near-identical, to text in an extended conference abstract from 2024. The study’s objectives and methods also bore strong similarity to the earlier work, which had been conducted by another group of researchers.

Poulami Barman, first author of the conference abstract and a dual-program Ph.D. student in India and Germany, became aware her work had been stolen after one of her supervisors alerted her to the new paper. It turned out she knew the article’s corresponding author well. Like Barman, Madhurima Sharma was a Ph.D. student at the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS) in Mumbai, and she had previously asked Barman to share her code. Barman had refused to do so until her work was published.

Authors asked Elsevier to retract papers in 2012. In one case, they’re still waiting.

Elsevier has retracted two papers for image duplication – 13 years after the authors alerted the journal to issues with the work.

The papers are the third and fourth retractions for a group of researchers in Ireland. The team had asked Elsevier journals to retract five papers in April 2012 — one of which is still in process.

The first two papers, published in Cancer Letters, were retracted in 2013.

Then last week, two more articles, published in the European Journal of Pharmacology (EJP), were retracted.

‘Biased’ and ‘unethical’: Journal objects to Scopus delisting

A home economics journal delisted from Scopus last year has called the decision “biased against journals from developing countries.”

Elsevier delisted the journal Nurture, published by “Nurture Publishing Group,” from the publisher’s citation database in June 2024, after indexing it for a dozen years. In an editorial published this April, Sadie Ahmad, the editorial manager for Nurture, wrote Scopus delisted the journal for three reasons: an increase in the number of scientific articles published, papers in topics beyond the scope of the journal, and an uptick of authors from different countries.

A representative from Elsevier told us Scopus’ decision was also a result of “weak quality” of papers and “low citation metrics compared to what one would expect of a journal with such history and scope.” The journal has been publishing since 2007.

When it comes to conflicts of interest, affiliations are apparently no smoking gun

Seven papers on various aspects of vaping and cigarettes published in Toxicology Reports listed each authors’ affiliation – the tobacco company Philip Morris International – when they originally appeared in the journal between 2019 and 2023. And all but one article disclosed the funding for the research originated from the company.

That apparently wasn’t enough for the journal.

Toxicology Reports has issued a correction to add those affiliations as a conflict of interest. The statements were “missing or incorrect” in the original papers, according to the correction notice, published in the June 2025 issue of Toxicology Reports. In addition to reiterating that the authors work for PMI, the correction also adds to the conflict of interest statements that the authors were funded by the company and used its products in the research.

Viral paper on black plastic kitchen utensils earns second correction

The authors of a paper that went viral with attention-grabbing headlines urging people to throw out their black plastic kitchen tools have corrected the work for a second time.

But a letter accompanying the correction suggests the latest update still fails “to completely correct the math and methodological errors present in the study,” according to Mark Jones, an industrial chemist and consultant who has been following the case. “The errors are sufficient to warrant a restating of the abstract, sections of the paper and conclusions, if not a retraction.”

The paper, “From e-waste to living space: Flame retardants contaminating household items add to concern about plastic recycling,” originally appeared in Chemosphere in September. The study authors, from the advocacy group Toxic-Free Future and the Amsterdam Institute for Life and Environment at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, looked for the presence of flame retardants in certain household plastic items, including toys, food service trays and kitchen utensils.

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